become a photography assistant to either Richard
Avedon or Irving Penn.
The young photographer had such talent and
determination that he soon met his goal. Within
two years of his arrival on American shores, Hiro
succeeded in being hired as Avedon’s assistant.
When Avedon went off to Paris on assignment he
asked Hiro to stay in New York and practice taking
commercial still lifes. The two exchanged corre-
spondence across the Atlantic, with Avedon alter-
nately praising and sharply criticizing Hiro’s work.
Quick to recognize the immensity of his talent, in
1958 Avedon named Hiro an associate at the studio.
A second major influence on Hiro’s photography
was Alexey Brodovitch, renowned art director for
Harper’s Bazaar. In 1956, Hiro began studying
photography at the New School for Social Research
with Brodovitch, who provided him with aesthetic
direction and career development. Impressed with
Hiro’s work, Brodovitch tested his readiness for pub-
lication with a deceptively simple assignment: he
asked him to photograph a Dior shoe. Hiro labored
for weeks before totally satisfying Brodovitch’s expec-
tations, at which point he was finally allowed to begin
working on assignments forHarper’s Bazaar.
Hiro developed his own aesthetic standards
according to Brodovitch’s dictum that one should
click the shutter only when the camera reveals
something that has never before been seen. This
emphasis on originality and innovation has re-
mained with Hiro throughout his career, and is
manifested in the frequently startling nature of his
compositions. He has a remarkable ability to gen-
erate surprise through his choices in composition
and his evocative use of hyper-saturated color. By
draping a ruby and diamond necklace over the hoof
of a steer, or allowing a tarantula to creep up a
model’s foot, he uses unexpected juxtapositions
that recall the strategies of surrealist art.
Though his images never shy from audaciousness,
Hiro’s technique is highly controlled and calculated.
He is as known for his intensity, control, and patience
as he is for his imagination. Approaching his medium
with a scientific precision, he is a consummate perfec-
tionist with a tendency to value preparation over
spontaneity. In the studio he is also a great experi-
menter, particularly with lighting. He obsesses over
the nature and quality of light, and has utilized
strobes, colored gels, infrared film, and neon to gen-
erate various effects. His interest in cinematography
led him to experiment with a movie camera, not out
ofadesiretobeafilmmaker,butinordertoapply
the appearance of moving pictures to still photo-
graphs. In the studio, he developed complex techni-
ques to convey a sense of motion. This filmic, shifting
focus can be observed in some of his portraits, which
have an interior focus but blurred edges.
In many ways, Hiro’s abilities and aesthetics are
particularly appropriate to commercial photogra-
phy. His love of innovation and novelty are per-
fectly suited to the aims of advertising and the
capitalist sensibility that drives it. His ostentatious
color, animated forms, and clarity of vision like-
wise make his images enormously appealing and
seductive, signs of the pleasures of excess. Yet his
depiction of products and commerce is not simplis-
tically celebratory. He has also used the medium of
advertising to make a critique about conspicuous
consumption, as in 1972, when he created a cos-
metics advertisement featuring a close-up of a
woman’s mouth as she gobbled pharmaceuticals.
Although he has never fully garnered a reputa-
tion as an art photographer, Hiro has a strong
body of work that he created independently for
non-commercial purposes. In 1962, on a return
trip to Japan, he took black and white portraits
of strangers cramped into subway cars, their bodies
pressed uncomfortably against the glass windows
of the train doors. The series succinctly conveys the
claustrophobia and anxiety of urban existence. In
1990, he published the bookFighting Birds/Fight-
ing Fish, featuring black-and-white photographs of
illegal cock fights and vibrant color photographs of
Siamese fighting fish. With these images, Hiro ele-
gantly conveys the choreography of the animals’
warlike gestures. More recently he turned his cam-
era to human subjects, and created black-and-
white images of babies. Rather than sentimentaliz-
ing the innocence of infancy, he instead radically
frames the compositions around fragments of the
infants’ bodies to underscore their strange, almost
alien quality.
ShannonWearing
Seealso:Fashion Photography; Penn, Irving; Por-
traitureBiography
Born Yasuhiro Wakabayashi in Shanghai, China, 3 Novem-
ber 1930. Attended New School for Social Research, New
York, 1956–1958. Photography assistant to Rouben Sam-
berg, 1954–1955, to Richard Avedon, 1956–1957, and to
Alexey Brodovitch, 1958–1960; Associate, Avedon Studio
1958–1971; Freelance magazine photography 1958-pre-
sent; Staff Photographer, Harper’s Bazaar, 1966–1974.
Received Gold Medal, Art Directors Club of New York,
1968; Photographer of the Year Award, American Society
of Magazine Photographers, 1969; Newhouse Citation,
Syracuse University, 1972; Society of Publication De-
signers Award, 1979; Certificate of Excellence, American
Institute of Graphic Arts, 1980 and 1981; Award of Excel-HIRO